Episode 2467 CWSA 05⧸07⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 23 minutes
Words per Minute
162.2828
Summary
In this episode of the show, Scott Adams talks about why the New York Yankees should change their name to something less offensive, and Apple and Riven, the electric car company, are talking about making a fully-fledged car company.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Human Civilization.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and I'm pretty sure there's never been a better time
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Today, not only our regular show, but toward the end, I'm going to do an interview with
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author Carmen Simon, and you're going to want to see that to learn more about how to be
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with her new book called Made You Look, available now for order.
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If you'd like to take this experience up to a level that nobody can even understand,
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all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a dunk or chalice, a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day,
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now.
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Well, I'm going to start a movement, and I hope you'll all join me.
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I realized recently, I just learned, that the name New York Yankees is racist.
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And I'm going to start a movement to make them change their names to something less offensive.
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Now, if you don't know the background, Yankees is actually a Dutch slur.
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So apparently the Dutch were the original settlers in New York City.
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And the Dutch often have names that sound like keys or yan.
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And so it was a Dutch slur to call them the yan keys or the New York Yankees or the damn Yankees,
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And so as someone who has a non-zero amount of Dutch blood in me,
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I insist that the New York Yankees change their name to something far less offensive.
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I would say, and they could keep the general concept.
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You might know that Jack Dorsey, after he left what was Twitter,
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was working on what could have been a competitor to Twitter called Blue Sky,
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But he's left the board of that company and he's endorsing X Platform.
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And he calls the X Platform a freedom technology.
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I don't know if that's endorsing it, but kind of endorsing it.
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In other news, Apple and the electric car truck company Riven, R-I-V-E-A-N.
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So that you're driving your Riven, which is, ugh.
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No, but if I'm driving my Riven, well, that's a good time.
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We don't know why Apple and Riven are talking, but as some people have noted,
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you could probably buy Riven for $10 billion and Apple's doing a buyback of their own stock
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So they've got $10 million laying around if they wanted to buy themselves a fully made car company.
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You know, I don't know if you've spent any time up close with the Riven, but, you know,
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there's one in my driveway almost every day and it belongs to Husway.
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I can kind of imagine that Apple, you know, being the design company that likes good design,
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I'll say that design-wise it looks pretty good.
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I don't know anything about the dependability or how much the drivers like it or any of that.
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Honestly, at this point, I don't know how anybody can compete with Tesla
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because Tesla has such an advanced bite on the self-driving.
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How many of you are having the problem I'm having right now,
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which is I'm sort of in the market for a new vehicle,
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but I'm thinking when will be my last combustion engine?
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Because I think that once I go electric, which I assume I'll go someday,
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So I'm actually thinking in terms of should I get my last gas engine
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and just sort of enjoy it for its, you know, nostalgic feel,
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or should I just go to the Tesla Y and get the self-driving?
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because whichever way you do, you're going to regret it, right?
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oh, I wish I had, you know, another year with a gas engine.
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And if I don't get the electric, I'm going to wish I had the self-driving car.
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But I'll tell you what I wouldn't, wouldn't buy right now.
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There's no scenario in which I would buy a Riven.
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you're going to want the Tesla network for charging.
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I don't know if the Riven is compatible with that yet,
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And secondly, you've got to have the self-driving part.
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The self-driving part is going to be 50% of the value of the damn car.
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And if there's only one company that can do it capably,
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I was just watching a video of a Tesla self-driving car,
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and it not only drove the entire way to the destination,
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but it picked out a parking space and parked in it.
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So, I mean, how are you going to compete with that?
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where they can make a case to lower your insurance costs by 50%.
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because it'll just lower your insurance costs eventually.
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Or maybe they'll just track the percentage of time
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you're using self-driving compared to regular driving
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the more of a discount you get at the end of the month,
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Yeah, it would have nearly $48,000 saved for retirement
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I don't even know if money will be worth something
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don't need any, but if you scramble them, they're
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going to be looking for certainty, and then you
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If you think about the brain, the most important
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And the reason we enjoy that which is familiar and
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biologically bad for the brain, because what is
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guideline for all of us to reflect on, because as
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you think about the content that you create, or
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moments where people think something is going to
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happen, and in fact, something else does surprise.
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Yes, different from novelty, by the way, because
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sometimes people treat those elements interchangeably.
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But novelty is something that you haven't seen or
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Surprise is something that you have experienced
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Like, for example, you have an eggshell, and suddenly
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You have seen the eggshell, you have seen the baby
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Now, another thing I saw in the book that interests
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me in particular, because it's based on something I
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used to do when I gave presentations in my corporate
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days, before I give a presentation on the boringest
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subject in the world, which was like the budget, like
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just impossible to keep people awake during that, I would
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hand out Tic Tacs, you know, the little lozenge thing, the
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Tic Tac, and everybody will take a Tic Tac, so that's the
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But it also gets them physically moving, and to keep
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somebody awake, if they're chewing, they'll stay awake.
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People don't fall asleep while their mouth is moving, and so
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I found that you could actually keep people a little bit
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more awake by making them move while you were talking to
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them, and the movement is just eating them the Tic Tac.
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So you said, yours was a deeper, complex thing, but you said
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something about getting people moving as part of the process.
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I like that reminder, one of the hottest trends in neuroscience
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right now is this notion of embodied cognition, because as
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scientists, we're recognizing more and more that the way we
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come to know things and perceive things and talk about politics
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or talk about the boardroom and the bedroom is not by simply
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looking around us and building some mental representations that
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What we know and what we perceive and what we remember and what
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we decide on comes at the intersection of the brain and body
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interacting with the environment, therefore embodied cognition.
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So whether you give people the Tic Tac to chew or what we're
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recommending business is inviting people to like physically take notes.
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I'm hoping that this conversation is useful to you and maybe you have
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The more you physically write, not electronically write, the stronger the
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If you have customers, invite them to an experience center if your products
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But yes, getting the brain and body in motion will definitely contribute to your
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When I would study back in my school days, I would try to take the same
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Sometimes I'd draw a picture because the process of turning the idea into a
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picture really solidifies it because you'll remember the picture and then you'll
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I'd be like, you know, two plus two equals three.
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So I would try to get as many physical bodily connections to the stuff.
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If you're here in a session like this, because you want to coach others, perhaps even your
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children, teach them how to keep the body in motion.
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We are at a strange point in our society because we're used to having so many things
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But the moment that you put the body in motion, the brain is put in motion as well.
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You keep your body still, then your cognition slows down also.
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So, you know, the amount of information in this book is kind of, it's amazing.
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So I'm going to have to spend a lot more time looking at it.
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But there were, in the end, there's like a whole checklist of things that you could have
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done in your presentation to have made it better.
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But you've done something that, as far as I know, has never been done, which is you've
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And it seems to me that there's some AI companies that's going to give you a billion dollars for
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If you could teach your AI to make you a PowerPoint slide or a video, and then one of the databases
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they had access to was, how does this affect people biologically?
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That's all something an AI could do if it had the data, couldn't it?
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We're sitting in a good position to have some biological markers for attention, for working
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Because it's one thing to watch something and pay attention for two minutes.
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But it's another to pay attention for 30 minutes, for hours on end.
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So you have to be motivated enough and have the biological endurance to do that.
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They're looking at how much the brain enjoys the experience and how alert and awake it is.
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Because you could ask your audience, what attracted your attention?
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But quite often, those self-reports are unreliable.
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So as AI models get trained, are they getting trained on serving data that quite often relies
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So it's good to use these kinds of signals and also debunk some myths.
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Like, for instance, it surprised me that complexity is actually more of an attention grabber than
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I don't know if you heard my earlier presentation.
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But you can also hide all your fuckery in complexity.
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So it's a place to diversify somebody's attention until they can't find the needle in the haystack.
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But I can also see how complexity would attract you.
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I'm going to spend a little time unraveling this.
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And I think, especially from a scientific perspective, it's good to define the terms.
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Because there's complexity, there's complication, and there's chaos.
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And often, I think, in the latter two, you could probably hide a few more things.
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But complexity, as long as you present to the brain some items that are not only large in volume,
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but also diverse and interconnected, and you add some meaning to this complexity that keeps the brain going,
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and you manage that complexity well, then the brain synchronizes a lot better with a complex stimulus
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than with a simple and quite often simplistic one.
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So if we turn this into a practical guideline, I would say complexify in a manageable way versus simplify your communication.
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So give us, let's say, what would you say if you were going to give somebody, say, the best operational tip?
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What's the one thing out of everything you learn from the studies, the sensors you put on people and your data?
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If you're going to make a PowerPoint or a video or something, what's the one thing you're going to make sure you absolutely do?
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Well, here's something that you can reflect on as we reach the end of the conversation, and it will make you think.
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It will not necessarily be easy to implement, but it will be very helpful.
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I found through all this research that one concept that comes up again and again is this notion of fractals.
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If you insist on some elements that maintain their properties at any level of magnification,
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like if you look at a tree, the shape of the tree is represented in any kind of tree branch.
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And if you look at a smaller branch yet, it still maintains the same properties as let's call it the father tree.
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Or if you go to the grocery store, look at a head of broccoli, you'll see that the broccoli itself has some properties.
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And then as you zoom in, every single little head of broccoli has some same properties or a cauliflower.
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And as you reflect on your communication and the way that you want to attract attention and remain memorable,
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pick a theme, something that repeats at any level of magnification.
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And the moment that you have that set of properties and you keep going again and again and again,
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Then as long as you make it that it's cauliflower all the way down,
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it doesn't matter if you're speaking to your audiences for two minutes, for two weeks, for two years.
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If you come back to the same theme and you make friends with fractals,
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you will be able to keep people's attention for a long time.
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So fractals is a tough word to wrap my head around.
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So today when I did my live stream before we talked,
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I said I had a theme that is that the Democrats were hiding things in complexity.
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And then I gave five different stories where there were some complexity and maybe some bad stuff was hidden in there.
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That is definitely a fractal because if you were to then expand on those themes,
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And it would be the same set of properties, the same set of sorely equations, for instance.
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So, yes, pick your theme and some supporting points.
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And as long as you're very consistent with those and you believe in them
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and they have great impact on society, too, that's always very, very helpful.
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Then you can keep the brain going for a while because you're giving it the best of both worlds.
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You're giving it some familiarity because it's the same repetition at any level of magnification.
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But with each elaboration, you can add some of those elements of surprises.
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You can complexify and you can keep the brain motivated to stay with you for a while.
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I'll tell you, my biggest pet peeve is when somebody wants to explain something to me
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and they're waiting to give me the answer at the end.
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So it would be like Josue, my builder handyman here.
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He'll say, you know, over by the eaves, there's this board that covers the thing
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and then there's the corner and I'm like, where is this going?
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And the answer is, you know, there's a leak and I can fix the leak.
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And then after I hear that, every detail he gives after that is now salient.
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I was like, oh, OK, so I'm understanding because the boards come together.
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But if you start with, OK, the boards come together, I'm like, I have no structure.
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I really like what you're saying in terms of elaboration because that's what builds up the complexity.
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And especially in business, in our personal relationships as well, you have to earn the right for that elaboration.
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And in your relationship with the plumber, that may be a little bit different because if your plumber had been Elon Musk and he started with the details at first and something that maybe initially didn't make sense, because your relationship is probably different, he has earned the right to elaborate first and then give you the...
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No, no, I'd be like, Elon, no, get to the point, get to the point.
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But I think what's important for people to recognize is that sometimes we are, let's say, in a business context and they may have heard the guideline, well, tell a story, because a story is just so attention grabbing and memorable.
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You have to earn the right for those details and you have to earn the right for the story.
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Sometimes you do have to start with a conclusion depending on your rapport.
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So if you start with a conclusion, you need to back it up, but it should also be, should it be like a surprising conclusion?
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In other words, you should have some novelty as well, such as, I'm going to show you over the next 40 minutes that everything you knew was wrong.
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Yeah, so you can start with something that challenges the status quo, challenges a personal norm, challenges the way that you're thinking in some way.
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Not that many business people know how to do this, by the way.
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You don't want to disregard accuracy in a budget meeting.
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In the book, by the way, you'll learn about this notion of exaggeration and discarding accuracy whenever you can.
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So as you think about your hooks, for instance, sure, some unusual stats could do the trick.
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But what about an unusual photo or something that you did not see, you did not predict, like we were talking earlier?
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So I'll just tell the viewers that several years ago you helped me build a presentation, a slide deck that went with my public speeches.
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And I had an experience with that that was so uniform.
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I'd give my talk, and usually it was a group of people who were there because they wanted to hear me.
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And then afterwards, maybe I'd sign some books or say hi to people.
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And people would come up to me, and I swear to God, every group said the same thing.
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Because it was so, so different than anything that I'd ever done or even seen, really.
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So I can confirm that the science that you were putting into it even a few years ago, before you did this book, was already completely lighting brains on fire.
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Like, people were just like, what did I just see?
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And they would talk about it, and they would come, they would act.
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That's the ultimate test, getting somebody to act.
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And, you know, I would tell them that you helped me, et cetera.
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And thank you so much for joining us, Carmen, and making us smarter.
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And anybody who reads this book is going to do a lot better in your presentations and getting people's attention and basically your life in general.
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So even if you're not in this kind of business, you might be interested for the academic, intellectual, why does something work and something doesn't?
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It's really a fascinating drive inside the brain.
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Thank you so much for all the kind words, and thank you for all the attention that we got here in the chat box.
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And keep in mind that if you do attract attention, you can stay on people's minds, and when you do, you will live longer.
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Thanks for joining, and I'll talk to you later.
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And everybody, thanks for joining, and I'll see you tomorrow, same time, same place.